this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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What is going on with Kbin (kbin.melroy.org)
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I almost feel like it's October last year, when I pled for improvement on all fronts regarding the Kbin development strategy. Now it seems development has ceased once again and there hasn't been chat on the matrix channels for over a week. Update: that's two weeks now (including his blog) and over a month of no visible Development.

Update: According to https://fedidb.org/software/kbin there are a grand total of 29 active kbin servers. Of 61,489 users on all instances, 59,962 of these are on kbin.social. To those users I would like to say that should kbin.social fail, there will always be Mbin servers to fall back to.

What is going on?

We can only speculate, based on what has happened in the past. Several mind bending theories can come to mind.

Perhaps Ernest (and whatever team still exists) is continuing development in the background, not publicly sharing his work on codeberg. He may have had enough of all the criticism and wants to do it his way without interference. This may sound a bit far fetched, but he's admitted in the past that he prefers concentrating on coding over communicating with his community.

Other theories could involve something bad involving Ernest personally, let us hope that is not the case. Ernest is a great person, nobody would wish anything bad upon him.

But in reality, speculation doesn't change anything, we can only deal with the situation at hand.

I believe waiting for a new release comes with too many risks in the current setting. Nobody can monitor the code during progress or do any testing for themselves while development is ongoing (assuming it is). If anything, what's coming next? Your guess is as good as mine.

A new version may well break compatibility between Kbin and Mbin. Mbin is trying to stay compatible with Kbin for as long as reasonably possible. However, staying compatible with something that is out of sight and out of one's control is challenging, if not impossible. A break in compatibility would mean there will be no easy way to migrate to Mbin after an upgrade for Kbin users who have patiently waited for one, should they want to.

I would not want the future of my instance to be dependent of such a level of uncertainty, now or in the future.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Kbin was a fantastic project and its developer deserves all our respect.

Unfortunately Kbin suffered a perfect storm that overwhelmed him: -he was born at the wrong time; indeed: he was born at a very right time! That is, just before migration from Reddit reached its peak

  • it was too immature and too good at the same time: users saw how good it was and dived into it en masse
  • as if that wasn't enough, even more users flocked to Kbin due to a well-known Fediverse popularizer, blinded by ideological hatred towards the Lemmy developers, who recommended it to everyone as the best alternative to Reddit, saying something lie: immature software like Kbin CAN NEVER be a better alternative than mature software like Lemmy (oh yes, congratulations FediTips: you actively contributed to sinking the Kbin boat!)
  • the developer was alone, a very normal circumstance for a project in development; but this led to an absurd overload and a totally destabilizing overexposure!
  • finally, the usual dynamic of free software has struck again: herds and herds of ignorant, selfish, resentful people lacking any empathy began to DEMAND improvements, modifications and corrections to a software that (I repeat once again) was still immature, without giving ANYTHING, and when I say NOTHING I mean without financing the project.

I completely understand that the developer went into burnout! The meltdown of lone developers is a very frequent phenomenon in free software... These pressures are almost impossible to bear: to bear them you need to have balls of steel, decent financial resources, many true friends and a pathological level of enthusiasm and self-esteem to resist such strong emotional pressure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

and when I say NOTHING I mean without financing the project.

This is not quite true, the project was being partially financed by external parties

But you are right. And we all know this. Kbin/mbin still is a fantastic project. We all respect Ernest for creating it. The software was immature as you said, a lot of people jumped in and offered their help, including actually making the features they were, as you call it, demanding. He was no longer alone. When things went south, everybody sympathized and several people offered him help and advice in many ways, which he has explicitly refused.

But that was all then, circumstances were far from optimal, indeed. Things are back to normal now, have in fact been for quite a while. This would have been the chance to get things sorted, especially delegating access to the back end of kbin.social, but sadly, nothing has changed

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

👍🏼

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Being on lemmy, I never really used kbin much.
All I know is there's a ton of spam coming from there, and their moderation seems spread thin.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago

I would not want the future of my instance to be dependent of such a level of uncertainty, now or in the future.

You can always go to a big provider like Facebook. They'll surely won't have issues with your documented whining on Kbin.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

If it helps, you can just use something else like Lemmy and still access all kbin content, that's what I'm currently doing.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

These types of threads always come across as whiny and overblown to me. Kbin works just fine the majority of the time, and it's still my preferred method for accessing microblogging/thread data.

The fediverse is a massive project, if you don't like what one part is doing go elsewhere, you can access most content in a variety of ways and it's good to have alternatives.

I'm far more appreciative of what kbin brings to the table than what all these naysaying posts and circle-jerks bring up everytime there is a lull.

Is there criticism of kbin, sure? But how is this constructive rather than whiny doom bait.

Edit: OPs whole post history is kbin whining. Whew.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

yeah I chose kbin because out of the options I found at the time I liked it best. Im not going to make a new account somewhere unless either kbin just gets bad for some reason (and im not someone who jumps ship due to a day or two it would have to be extensive) or some other thing would have to have some sort of amazing features that made it worthwhile and given I like simplicity overall I doubt that will happen.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If your instance admin would choose to switch to Mbin, you'd hardly notice and you'd definitely not have to make a new user account

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I mean if kbin switched to mbin then yes I would be using mbin. I was talking more reasons I might make a new account because the old one was not cutting it.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

the concern is one day you go to login, and it aint there. at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

yeah. I would likely make an account in that situation unless it was temporary.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I'm not too familiar with the drama but any time I visit kbin.social there's some error or outage going on. Also the documentation is pretty lackluster, developing 3rd party tools for kbin is pretty much impossible.

Mbin looks way more promising, if anything because of the better docs, new features and community-driven direction it's taking. I hope most kbin users jump ship.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Ernest is still posting devlogs:

https://kbin.social/u/ernest